I’m a nurse, I’ve recently gone back to hospital work after a very long time doing other things.
It is unbelievable what we are doing and what we are spending to keep extremely elderly people alive another few months - often so they can spend those few months laying in their own piss and shit, not really aware what is going on.
I’m not suggesting that once you turn 85 we take you out the back and shoot you. Indeed, I’m not quite sure what I’m suggesting and I certainly don’t have all the answers. What I do know is that a lot of what we are doing to keep elderly alive is extremely expensive, and frankly, quite cruel to them.
We run expensive tests that the results really won’t change outcome much
We pump them full of antibiotics to clear pneumonia so they can go back to the nursing home and sit and stare into space.
Spoon feeding crushed medication to advanced dementia patients. Of course im all for meds that reduce pain, but that’s not all we are giving a lot of people.
I’m not sure how much of our Medicare budget is spent on trying to give the elderly a few more miserable weeks or months, but it would have to be a hell of a lot.
Example - recently we had a lady with advanced dementia, no longer aware of who she was, no longer speaking, required help for absolutely everything.
My colleague noticed a mouth droop. Told the junior doctor. Her, in my opinion, sensible response was “ look, she may have had a stroke but I don’t think we’ll do anything other than keep her comfortable at this point, but I’ll talk to my boss”.
The senior doctor decided that what this shell of a woman needed was a CT scan, blood tests, get a cannula in and start antibiotics to cover for possible infection.
Now imagine the above, or something similar, happening again and again and again across the country, at huge cost and to what end?
We need to, as a nation, accept that once you get old, you die. And do we really want to spend billions attempting, often fruitlessly, to give very elderly people a few extra days, months or weeks